GENES OF TIME

GENES OF TIME: ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF MODERN HUMANSWhat science, especially natural history and genetics tell us is the near opposite of what historians and linguists have been saying for over a century. In particular, they have vastly underestimated the time scales involved by an order of magnitude.Navaratna Rajaram

Introduction: natural history-genetics
There is now a revolution in our understanding of our past. Science has finally answered the 200 year-old question of why people from India to Iceland speak languages clearly related to one another.

By modern humans scholars often mean bipedal humans, which supposedly left their hands free for tool-making. This is misleading since the only humans now populating the planet are speaking humans with language. All others including Neanderthals are extinct. Hence speech and language were of paramount importance in the survival of the human species. Only then can we talk about the spread of related languages from India to Iceland.
Studies of population genetics indicate that all non-African humans and their languages can be traced to about a thousand individuals in South Asia some 60,000 years ago.

FOX P2 , the language gene, which made us speaking species

Two major events during the Pleistocene (or the last Ice Age)—a gene mutation about 80,000 or more years ago and a massive volcanic eruption 73,000 years ago—played a crucial role in triggering the evolution and spread of Indo-Europeans and their languages.
It is natural history, not linguistics that has cut the Gordian Knot of Indo-European origins. Natural history and archaeology both show there were at least two waves of migration out of India into Eurasia and Europe during the prehistoric (c. 40,000 YBP or Years Before Present) and the proto historic (c. 10,000 YBP) periods. Further, it is Sanskrit, not any Proto-Indo-European that has left its mark on Indo-European languages. It may further be said that Sanskrit is to linguistics what mathematics has been to the natural sciences.
With slightly less confidence it may be said that Vedas and the later Sanskrit (of the Upanishads, epics and the classical) were all products of a period of intense cultivation of language culture lasting thousands of years. They were painstakingly constructed by drawing upon Gauda (northern) and Dravida (southern) sources prevailing in the Indian subcontinent around 10,000 years ago if not earlier. This accounts for the so-called ‘Dravidian’ features in the Rig Veda as well as the extraordinary perfection of Sanskrit grammar. They are the product of a culture that took the science of language—etymology and grammar—to heights that were never again to be attained. Example: Panini and Yaska and the Mahabhashya of Patanjali.

Fallacious language model based on non-existent PIE.

This goes against modern theories (or rather beliefs) that seek to derive languages from a common source often called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). In this essay we take the view that anatomically modern humans with language capability came from East Africa migrated to India and spread across the subcontinent and moved to other parts of the world. This is supported by the haplogrups of world populations. From South Asia they spread to other parts of the world, including Europe. There were other human species in India earlier, but their descendants have not survived. We, descendants of the speaking humanoids of African origin are the only remaining survivors of the humanoid species.

Rigveda knowledge and content
This helps address another puzzle. How Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest surviving language is also the most sophisticated, even more so than literary Sanskrit with its highly sophisticated grammar and etymology. The Vedic people may have been primitive in material terms but there was nothing primitive about their language or poetry. The Rigvedic language and its content are the product of a long period of evolution and development when humans had speech capability but no fixed language.
We know that children are born with speech and language capability but acquire language from their surroundings. But how about the first humans, who came with a language capability but had to create languages where none existed before. So they had to struggle for thousands of years to create language(s). Geneticists tell us that humans who migrated to India from East Africa lived in a state of drift for something like 15,000 years after the Toba explosion wiped out most of the human population.
It is reasonable to suppose that this long period of drift was when early languages came into being, which were then used to create the Rigvedic language. This may help explain why such great care was taken by generations of Vedic seers to preserve the Vedic language and the Vedas with pristine purity. They recognized this to be their greatest heritage and achievement.
The same natural history suggests there may be a similar story of East and Southeast Asian peoples and languages— almost like a mirror reflection of the birth and spread of Indo-Europeans. It is a story that remains to be told. Thus, the picture given by science is the exact opposite of the Aryan invasion-migration theories favored by linguists for over a century. Above all it may said with confidence that historians and linguists in particular have very greatly underestimated the time spans by compressing time scales by an order of magnitude driven by the compulsion to fit history within the 6000 years mandated by the Biblical Belief in Creation.

It is reasonable to suppose that this long period of drift was when early languages came into being, which were then used to create the Rigvedic language. This may help explain why such great care was taken by generations of Vedic seers to preserve the Vedic language and the Vedas with pristine purity. They recognized this to be their greatest heritage and achievement.

The same natural history suggests there may be a similar story of East and Southeast Asian peoples and languages— almost like a mirror reflection of the birth and spread of Indo-Europeans. (See map above.) It is a story that remains to be told. Thus, the picture given by science is the exact opposite of the Aryan invasion-migration theories favored by linguists for over a century. Above all it may said with confidence that historians and linguists in particular have very greatly underestimated the time spans by compressing time scales by an order of magnitude driven by the compulsion to fit history within the 6000 years mandated by the Biblical Belief in Creation.

Prehistoric archaeology and Vedic astronomy

People have long sought to locate the archaeological remains of the Vedic people, but the issue has been clouded by the gratuitous introduction of the undefined term Aryan, making it a search for Aryan archaeology. Crackpot theories claiming no horse and no wheel in India before the Aryan invasion made some place the original Aryans (undefined) in South Russia and Kurgan steppes (Ukraine), north of the Black Sea. All this has been totally demolished by science.

Prehistoric archaeology explored by workers like J. Petraglia, Ravi Korisettar and their colleagues suggest that Indians have lived where they are today for 60,000 years or more following their advent from Africa. This means that early astronomical dates like the Fall of Abhijit (Vega) which gives us 12,000 years before present may be plausible and cannot be dismissed. All this calls for a complete overhaul of what is called Indology, which we next survey.

Western Indology: ‘Discovery’ of Sanskrit

Unlike most academic disciplines, Indology (i.e. Western study of India) and its offshoot of Indo-European studies can be dated almost to the day. In a lecture in Kolkotta delivered on 2 February 1786 (and published in 1788) Sir William Jones, a forty year-old British jurist in the service of the East India Company observed:

“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists…”

This influential statement is well known but not the errors Jones committed like his dating of Indian tradition based on the Biblical superstition that the world was created on Sunday, 23rd of October 4004 BCE at 9:00 AM— time zone not specified. The date was first derived by the Irish bishop James Ussher (1581 – 1656) based on a literal reading of the Bible combined with the belief that world would end 2000 years after Christ, meaning it should have ended some twelve years ago.

While it sounds comical today, it was taught as history through most of the nineteenth century even though both Darwin’s theory of evolution and geology had determined the earth had to be millions of years old to support fossils and the enormous diversity of life forms. Even this very greatly underestimated its age. (The current estimate for the age of the earth is about 4.5 billion years.)

Bible as history

Jones was a capable linguist and knew some Sanskrit. His task was to study Indian texts and understand Hindu law to help administer British justice in a manner acceptable to them. In his study of Hindu texts like the Puranas he came across dates that went much further back than the Biblical date for Creation. He dismissed them as superstitions (for failing to agree with the Biblical superstition) and imposed a chronology on Indian history and tradition to fit within the Biblical framework.

This was to have fateful consequences for the study of India over the succeeding two centuries down to the present. To cite an example, Indian tradition going back at least to the mathematician Aryabhata (476 – 540 CE) has held that the Kali Age began with the Mahabharata War in 3102 BCE. This marks the end of an era known as the Vedic Age. Accepting it takes the beginning of the Vedic period as well as several dynasties like the Ikshwakus to 6000 BCE and earlier. This is millennia before the Biblical date for Creation which men like Jones could not accept.

Dates based on the Biblical chronology were accepted as historically valid by most Western scholars like F. Max Müller, the most influential of them. He explicitly stated that he took the Biblical account including the dates to be historical. Most of them were classical scholars or students of religion and had no inkling of science. The widely quoted dates of 1500 BCE for the Aryan invasion and the 1200 BCE date for the Rig Veda were imposed to make them conform to the Biblical Creation date of 4004 BCE.

The situation has not changed much in the succeeding two centuries. Indologists like Wendy Doniger, Diana Eck, Michael Witzel and their Indian counterparts like Romila Thapar have little comprehension of the revolution in our understanding of the past brought about by science in the past two decades. They continue to quote 1200 BCE for the Rig Veda without mentioning that it rests on the authority of a 400 year-old Biblical superstition! (Some ‘scholars’ like Doniger and Thapar don’t know any Sanskrit either, but that is a different matter.) The main point is they know no more science than their predecessors of a century and more ago.

Popular but faulty map of languages

Language puzzle, linguistic perversion

To return to Jones and his successors, in their ignorance of science it was natural they should have come up with some speculative theories to account for similarities between Sanskrit and European languages, especially Greek and Latin. Being linguists, they created a field called philology of comparing languages and cultures but it soon got mixed up with crackpot theories on race and language— like the ‘Aryan’ race speaking ‘Aryan’ languages somehow ending up in Nazi Germany! There was even an ‘Aryan’ science movement that demonized Einstein and his ‘Jewish’ physics! It was denounced by scientists, especially in the twentieth century, but politics and prejudice kept it alive for over a century. In addition to the Nazi ideology, British colonial policy used race as a way of classifying its British Indian subjects.

Setting aside such aberrations, Jones did raise a legitimate question: why do people from India and Sri Lanka to Ireland and Iceland speak languages clearly related to one another, and have done so for more than two thousand years? This fact has been widely noted and a few examples help illustrate the point. What is deva in Sanskrit becomes dio in Latin, theo in Greek and dieu in French. Similarly, agni for fire in Sanskrit becomes ignis in Latin from which we get the English words ignite and ignition. Amusingly, the famous Russian drink vodka has its Sanskrit cognate in udaka both meaning water. And there are many more, far too many to be seen as coincidence. Prejudice and politics aside this basic question remains.

Over the past two hundred years many theories have been created to account for these similarities. These are based mostly on superficial phonetic similarities but none has proved satisfactory. Even without the confusion due to race theories, these explanations give glaring inconsistencies. To take one example, using the same data and the same methods some scholars have argued that a branch of Indo-Europeans called ‘Aryans’ invaded India, while some others claim the reverse— that Aryans (or Indo-Europeans) originated in India and migrated to Eurasia and Europe taking their language(s) with them. The AIT of course holds the opposite view—that the invading Aryans were the eastern branch of Indo-Europeans whose original homeland was in Eurasia or Europe.

March of science

With the benefit of hindsight one can see that the science needed to unlock the language mystery did not become fully available until about fifty years ago. It was only in the last few decades, with the emergence of molecular biology after World War II and especially gene sequencing and genome research in the past decade and more that we are able to trace the origin and spread of Indo-Europeans and their languages. Two areas of natural history— the distribution of mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes (and haplogroups) in the world’s population groups and the fate of humans in the face of natural events have resulted in the spread of Indo-Europeans and their languages from a group of perhaps as few as a thousand 60,000 years ago well over two billion speakers today.

L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, leading population geneticist

What has allowed us to unlock the mysteries of IE origins is science, especially natural history and population genetics. Population genetics was founded by Sir Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright and J.B.S. Haldane. Fisher, a geneticist as well as statistician had two outstanding successors, C. Radhakrishna Rao (C.R. Rao) and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Rao became known as the world’s greatest mathematical statistician while Cavalli-Sforza carried forward Fisher’s work in population genetics, combining microbiology with mathematical genetics. If we are able to unlock the secrets of our origins it is thanks to these pioneers. The material presented here, especially in the second part, draws heavily on the work of Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues. (This author had the good fortune of working with C.R. Rao while a student in the U.S.)

What is extraordinary in all this is the depth and power of scientific analysis needed to unlock the puzzle. Linguistics, the principal tool used for over two hundreds has proven unequal to the task of unraveling the mystery of our origins. The creation of Vedic and Sanskrit languages in India going back perhaps 10,000 years or more was crucial in the evolution of the final phase of Indo-European languages.

Also remarkable is the immense time scales involved— not thousands but tens of thousands of years. Even this is miniscule by evolutionary standards. We Indo-Europeans (and their ancestors Gauda-Dravidas and Afro-Indians) have been on the planet for barely 65 thousand years, while dinosaurs ruled the earth for as many million years. What follows next is a brief account of our origin and spread. This is on the basis of our current knowledge and might change due to new discoveries.

It is worth noting that the three great philosophers, Shankara, Madhva and Ramanuja, all from the South, wrote in Sanskrit.

The Aryan myth and the idea of the invasion (AIT) were taught as history for nearly a century until archaeologists discovered the Harappan or the Indus Valley civilization. It continues to be taught in one form or another in spite of the many contradictions highlighted by archaeologists like Jim Shaeffer and B.B. Lal as well as natural scientists like Sir Julian Huxley L. Cavalli-Sforza and others. Politics and entrenched academic interests have succeeded in keeping alive this two hundred year old ad-hoc hypothesis but science has put an end to its survival while at the same time opening a vast new window on the origin and spread of Indo-Europeans.

Recent discoveries in natural history and population genetics, especially in the past two decades have changed our understanding of Indo-European origins in ways that were totally unexpected. The picture, still a bit hazy, highlights the fact that theories like the AIT are naïve and simplistic. To begin with, they very greatly underestimate the time scales involved and also ignored the revolutionary impact of natural history on humans in the past hundred thousand years. It is science, not linguistic theories that help us unlock the mystery of Indo-Europeans.

A volcano and a gene mutation

Our story takes us to Africa some hundred thousand years ago. Our ancestors, called ‘anatomically modern humans’ have been located in fossils in East Africa dating to about that time or a bit earlier. We were not the only humans then existing: there were several other ‘humanoid’ species in Asia and Africa among which the now extinct Neanderthals are the best known. What separates us from them is we have survived and they have not. In addition we are a speaking species with language without which civilization as we know it is inconceivable. So it is the origin of spoken language that we must speak and not just phonetic similarities; with some effort we can find phonetic similarities between any two languages.

This also explains the genetic bottleneck following the Toba super-volcanic explosion. This was followed by 6000 to 10,000 year drift during which only a small number of humans, perhaps 5000 or fewer in India. survived. This also helps account for the great genetic similarity of the humans living today.

The language (and human) picture may be stated simply as follows.

Speaking Africans –> Afro-Indians (Gauda-Dravida) –>Indo-Europeans

This means there were two major waves of Indo-Europeans, both out of India into the north and west. We know of the first (c. 45,000 BCE) only from genetic studies of modern populations around the world. We have no idea what their languages were like. The second, and much more recent, occurred at the turn of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition some 10,000 years ago. It has left many traces in archaeology, genetics, culture, and above all in the Sanskritic imprint on the languages of Europe and Eurasia. This is supplemented by genetic and other scientific data relating to animals that accompanied them including of rats and mice!

Finale: why India and Sanskrit so pivotal?

The role of Sanskrit or what led up to it played therefore a crucial role. Sanskrit grew along two parallel tracks—Vedic and what became classical. As Sri Aurobindo pointed out a century ago, the Rig Veda, the world’s oldest literature, was the culmination of a long effort that must have occupied thousands of years and not the beginning. Everything that followed is a simplification and in some ways a degeneracy— even the later Vedas like the Yajur. Its creators must have recognized that they had created something extraordinarily precious because they put in enormous effort into preserving it through hundreds of generations of teachers and pupils as well as devising methods like ghana-patha, pada-patha and the like to facilitate the preservation.

While less sophisticated than the Vedic, the later classical Sanskrit also was carefully constructed language as the word ‘Samskrita’ indicates. This explains the extraordinary perfection of its grammar: the grammar used by Kalidasa 2000 years ago is the same as what we use today. This is not true of any other language, and it is no accident. Since the idea that it was brought by invading Aryans has been demolished by science, we must look to indigenous sources. Sanskrit is and will always remain the lynchpin of linguistics, not any PIE or anything else. Sanskrit can do without PIE and has for thousands of years but Indo-European Studies will collapse without Sanskrit.

India was (and is) pivotal because of its strategic location and climate. Both land and sea routes—east-west as well as north-south—are accessible from India. Also, India enjoys a subtropical climate that allows both tropical and temperate flora and fauna to flourish.

The picture given here is by no means definitive but decidedly more in agreement with scientific data and the fossil record than linguistic theories like the AIT which must now be relegated to the dustbin of history. Many details remain to be filled, but any new theory must account for scientific data, especially from natural history and genetics, and take also into account the vast time scales involved. Such momentous developments as the evolution and spread of languages over half the world cannot be squeezed into a few thousand years like the Biblical account of Creation in 4004 BC on which AIT was based.

Toba destroys humans & vegetation in South Asia giving rise to a 6 year ‘volcanic winter’ and a 6000 year to 10,000 year freeze.

Note: The titleand the approach were suggested by the author’s late father Col (Dr.) N.S. Rao, an eminent medical scientist with interest in history. (Picture, above left.)

The author gratefully acknowledges valuable suggestions and help from Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer, Dr. David Frawley, Dr. Premendra Priyadarshi and Dr. Rosalie Wolfe. The material presented here is a summary only, keeping in mind the fact not all the readers will be familiar with the highly technical details relating to population genetics of humans as well as of the flora and fauna on which it rests. It should be seen only as a framework for future presentations and research. The author has just completed a book on the book Genes of Time and the Birth of History in which fuller details will be provided. The author would also like to remark that the research and the methodology followed here owe nothing to the so-called Out of India Theory or the OIT, which the author sees as little better than the now discredited AIT.